The Chicago Sky’s Hidden Defense – Rebounding
It is easy to take a glance at the raw stats of the Chicago Sky and conclude their problem is defense. The Sky rank atop the WNBA in points per game, at 83.1, almost five ahead of the nearest team, the Indiana Fever. And the Sky are allowing 80.2 points per game, with only the Atlanta Dream giving up more.
But bring tempo into the mix, and the picture changes a bit. Not on the offensive end: the Sky are a legitimately elite offensive team, not some inefficient Paul Westhead creation, with an ORating of 105.6, easily the best in the league. But defensively, the Sky are middle-of-the-pack in DRating, seventh of twelve, and just a stone’s throw from league average.
The Sky, at their best, play at a fast pace. They are second in the league in pace, and it’s working for them. And that’s been increasingly true as the season’s progressed, upshifting from a 5-5 start into a 12-6 run that’s put them at 17-11 for the season. This is an offense that thrives on fast break points, where they are second in the league, and in getting open shots in transition, or Elena Delle Donne moving downhill like an extremely accurate boulder.
“It goes back to—we’re a team that gets 20+ points a game in transition,” Sky coach Pokey Chatman explained in an interview earlier this month. “So it’s about getting stops, rebounds and get out on the run, get it to Cappie or Elena or Allie Quigley. But if we don’t, that immediately stalls our offense.”
So in essence, there are two things the Sky need in order to maximize their offense on the defensive end. Forcing misses is only the first. They also must excel at defensive rebounding. And that’s where the return to health of Jessica Breland and acquisition of Erika de Souza have been so important.
“Breland’s worked really hard to get healthy,” Chatman said. “She hurt her shoulder in the playoffs, she had a little shin injury overseas. She made the decision to come home early, forego some money abroad, to get healthy. So she had some muscle-memory stuff—it took her a while. She’s not the strongest, she’s not the tallest, but her timing’s really good, she’s elusive, and sometimes she’ll get us an extra possession. She’s healthy, and now she’s comfortable.”
Unfortunately, Basketball-Reference doesn’t yet have gamelogs,[1. Ed. An enormous obstacle to better public analytics work on the WNBA is the paucity of underlying data we’ve come to take or granted as available for NBA and even NCAA play. Even the team defensive rebounding percentages used in this post had to be calculated as even that simple a stat is not available on the team level from WNBA.com or Basketball Reference.] let alone advanced game logs to account for an improvement in Breland’s rebounding rate stats, but it is possible to see a huge jump in Breland’s rebounding just from the pet game aggregates. She pulled down 13 in the Sky’s opener, a rout of Indiana, but just 40 total over her next nine games, or just over four per game. She’s up over 6.3 per game in the 17 she’s played since.
Much of that came on the defensive glass—for the year, she’s grabbing 20.4 percent of the available rebounds. But she has company in those pursuits on her own team. Delle Donne is at 22.3 percent of the available defensive rebounds, a huge jump from last year’s 11.4, and perhaps the most dangerous defensive rebounder of all, as someone so skilled in taking it the length of the floor once she does. And de Souza, who’s played in 11 games now for the Sky, is just behind Breland at 20.1 percent of the available defensive rebounds. Clarissa dos Santos and Cheyenne Parker are above 19 percent, and even perimeter defensive stopper Tamera Young is above 15 percent. All in all, Chicago sits 3rd in the WNBA in DREB%:
[1.
ED: Washington’s low DREB% is probably at least partially attributable to their extremely low foul rate. Only Minnesota has forced a higher ratio of missed FGA to missed FTA than Washington this season, and thought detailed data is not available for the WNBA, at the NBA level,]
It’s all vital, and crashing the defensive boards a logical strategy for Chatman to pursue, considering that even with all those offensive rebounding opportunities curtailed, the Sky are still third-worst in the league at allowing second-chance points. (That’s not a tempo-free stat, of course.)
Accordingly, every defensive rebound isn’t merely an end to a Sky opponent’s possession. It is an opportunity to unleash the best offense in the league.